The Rolling Stones

The Rolling Stones were second only to The Beatles in popularity during the 1960s.  They emerged as one of a new surge of groups that were playing rhythm & blues. Egged on by their young manager Andrew Oldham they cultivated a rough, rebellious image, something to shock the establishment. An American critic later commented: 'If the Beatles are a wholesome lot, the Rolling Stones looked like Neanderthal Teddy Bears'.

The Rolling Stones’ earliest origins date back to the boyhood friendship of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, forged in 1951. Their acquaintance was interrupted when both families moved in the mid-Fifties but got rekindled in October 1960, when the two ran into each other at a train station. While making the rounds of London blues clubs, Jagger and Richards met guitarist Brian Jones, a member of Blues Incorporated.  'At the beginning', lead signer Alexis Korner noted later, 'Mick and Keith hero-worshipped Brian.  He seemed about twenty years older than them'.  'Brian had a presence that was definitely electric', Bill Wyman recalled.  'Mick did too, in a strange way, but I always felt Mick's personality was more self-consciously constructed; I don't remember him having the same sort of magical aura in those early days.'

When Alexis Korner skipped one of his regular Marquee gigs to appear on a BBC radio show, Jagger, Jones and Richards seized the opportunity to debut their new group on 12 July 1962. This early line-up included bassist Dick Taylor (later a founding member and guitarist for the Pretty Things), drummer Mick Avory (a future member of The Kinks) and keyboardist Ian Stewart (the Stones’ lifelong road manager and adjunct member).

The Rolling Stones thereafter commandeered an eight-month residency at the Crawdaddy Club, where they attracted a following of fans and fellow musicians. By that time, the group’s final lineup had been set, with founding members Jagger, Richards and Jones augmented by drummer Charlie Watts (another former member of  Blues Incorporated) and bassist Bill Wyman. By this time they were the hottest unsigned band in town and Andrew Loog Oldham became their manager.  'I knew what I was looking at', he later told people.  'It was sex'.

'A lot of changes occurred', Keith Richards later recalled.  'Andrew said, "If you want to make records you've got to go down the pop path, get in there and be able to manoeuvre a bit", because in those days you made a record and you'd just see guys in brown coats walking around and pointing a microphone saying, "Stand here and do this".  So we said, "We'll just do what the Beatles don't!" It was like not wearing a uniform'.

The Rolling Stones cut their first record, Come On in May 1963 for the Decca label. The group’s second single, I Wanna Be Your Man, was given to them by Lennon and McCartney after a chance meeting.  The first half of 1964 saw the Rolling Stones headline their first British tour  and release the single Not Fade Away.

The Rolling Stones’ commercial breakthrough came in mid-1964 with their rollicking, country-blues rendition of Bobby Womack’s It’s All Over Now, which went to #3 on the British chart and just missed the U.S. Top Forty. By this time Oldham had made another decision, the band would have to write their own songs.  He pushed Mick and Keith into their kitchen at Mapesbury Road and don't them not to come out without a song.  Their first composition, a balled titled As Times Goes By, would later be renamed As Tears Go By, a future hit for the Stones in America and for Marianne Faithfull in the UK.  Another early composition, That Girl Belongs To Yesterday was a hit for Gene Pitney.  'We were already writing hit songs, but, like, on the side,' Keith declared, 'no way we would touch these things with a bargepole by ourselves.  Trying to get around to writing a song we could record took quite a while, but once we got into realizing that, hey, we already had a couple of hits, we thought, "All we got to do is work on it, and we probably will find it". So we started to work towards that end'.

By 1965, Keith and Mick had matured into a major song-writing force re-inventing the Stones with the singles The Last Time and (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction. The last of these, built around a compelling fuzztone guitar riff from Richard. On 6 May on their American tour, at a motel room in Clearwater in Florida, Keith played Mick the riff and words which had come to him in the middle of the night. In its 1988 critics poll of the 100 best singles of the last 25 years, Rolling Stone magazine put Satisfaction at the top of the list, describing it as ‘the rock’n’roll equivalent of the opening notes of Beethoven’s Fifth’.  In the same article, Keith Richards outlined the song’s influence on subsequent Stones material: ‘I hear Satisfaction in Jumping Jack Flash. I hear it in half the songs that the Stones have done.  I’m almost to the point now, after writing songs for so many years, that there is only one song – it’s just the variations you come up with’.

Aftermath, released in April 1966, was the first Stones albums to consist entirely of Jagger-Richards originals. Recorded at the RCA Studios in Hollywood, underlining the Stones refusal to be confined to their record company’s own studios as was the custom at the time.

The year 1967 was an eventful one for the Rolling Stones. Not only did they release three albums, but also they were beset with legal troubles stemming from a string of media-instigated drug busts. When the dust cleared, Jagger, Richards and Jones had narrowly escaped prison sentences. However, whereas the ordeal seemed to strengthen Jagger and Richards’ steely resolve, ongoing substance abuse was rapidly causing Jones’ physical and mental state to degenerate. He was only marginally involved in sessions for Beggar’s Banquet, the Stones’ 1968 masterpiece, and his departure from the group was announced on June 8th, 1969, with “musical differences” being cited as the reason. On July 3rd of that year, Jones was found dead in his swimming pool, the official cause being given as “death by misadventure.”

Jones’ replacement was Mick Taylor, former John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers guitarist who made his debut with the Stones at a July 5th free concert in London’s Hyde Park. Attended by a crowd of 250,000, the concert launched the Stones’ 1969 tour while paying last respects to Jones. By this time the Stones had returned to basic rock and roll with the classic singles Jumping Jack Flash, Street Fighting Man, and Honky Tonk Woman’.

After The Beatles split, it was the Stones who replaced them as the world’s greatest band. In 1971, the Stones launched their own record company, Rolling Stones Records, with the release of Sticky Fingers and its raunchy first single, Brown Sugar. With a cover designed by Andy Warhol that featured an actual working zipper, Sticky Fingers came across as an assured, prototypically Seventies rock album whose varied musical settings benefited from guitarist Taylor’s melodic touch. They followed this succinct, fine-tuned work with a sprawling, raucous masterpiece: the double album Exile on Main Street.  Subsequent albums - such as Goats Head Soup (1973), It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll (1974) and Black and Blue (1976) - yielded solid individual songs but represented a kind of creative lull, lacking the sustained brilliance of the band’s recorded output from 1968 to 1972, when they could do no wrong. Internal factors, including Richards’ mounting drug problems, Taylor’s abrupt departure in 1974 and Jagger’s jet-setting lifestyle, contributed to the air of instability. Ron Wood, a member of the Faces and Rod Stewart’s frequent collaborator and accompanist, was chosen as Taylor’s replacement for the Stones’ 1975 tour. With Wood’s complete integration into the line-up, and driven by the insurgent challenge of punk-rock, the Stones delivered one of the hardest-hitting albums of their career, Some Girls, in 1978.

The Eighties yielded both the group’s best-selling album (Tattoo You, #1 for nine weeks in 1981) and the longest period ever between Stones tours (eight years). A growing estrangement between Jagger and Richards culminated in a three-year lull after the release of Dirty Work (1986). Happily, the standoff ended when Jagger and Richards successfully resumed their working relationship during a ten-day song-writing retreat in Barbados. The Stones regrouped for an energetic, well-received world tour following the recording of strong, creatively resurgent Steel Wheels. (Wanting to exit on a high note, bassist Wyman announced his retirement from the band in 1992). In the Nineties, the Rolling Stones have found a way to accommodate the solo careers of its two principals, Jagger and Richards, while leaving time for band projects. In fact, the group is seemingly more active now than it’s been since the Seventies, having released studio albums (including the Stones’ first Best Rock Album Grammy-winner, Voodoo Lounge) and the live No Security, and kicked off lengthy tours in 1994 (Voodoo Lounge) and 1997 (Bridges to Babylon). Through it all, no one has yet dethroned the Rolling Stones of their title as the World’s Greatest Rock & Roll Band.